What is Functional Cognition?

Functional cognition encompasses the complex and dynamic interactions between an individual’s cognitive abilities and the activity context that produces observable performance.

This definition was active on the home page of the Allen Cognitive Network in 2013. The term, functional cognition, is now used worldwide. Since its introduction by Pollard and Olin in the publication, “Allen’s Cognitive Levels: Meeting the Challenges of Client Focused Services” (2nd Edition), 2005, ‘functional cognition’ describes this core construct of recognising the link between brain function and task behaviour.

As early as 1982 Allen and colleagues were observing patterns of task behaviour in individuals with mental health disorders and dementias and advocated a need for a more unified, global approach. The term ‘functional cognition’ became accepted following its use by Earhart in the 2006 publication of the Allen Diagnostic Manual, and then in 2009 by Austin in her dissertation paper as part of the requirements for her PhD in Educational Psychology. Since then, ‘functional cognition’ has been used widely to describe the central construct of the assessments applied as it emphasises the importance of the complex and dynamic interactions between an individual’s cognitive abilities and their context that produces observable functional performance.

Healthcare clinicians are assisted when using the construct of functional cognition to describe how an individual’s functional behaviours are guided by the degree to which they are able to use cues in their environment, along with the degree to which the environment provides the types of cues that they are able to use.

To clarify further, functional cognition identifies predictable patterns of motor and verbal skills, social behaviour, self awareness, and awareness of contexts that are viewed as interrelated and arise from a unified set of underlying cognitive (mental) processes, which work in concert to provide a global view of cognition. The name does not meet with opposition in healthcare clinician teams and is viewed as being very different to traditional psychological testing, which tends to describe cognition in terms of discrete elements such as memory, processing speed, and attention.